Bangkok Glutton

The filet mignon at Today Steak

(All photos by Dwight Turner)

There is something that happens when you’re seated at a table and a plate of food is set in front of you. There is no longer any need to think; there is only the basic, animal act of getting that food into your mouth in a way that will settle the stomach that’s telling you it’s been ignored. After a few bites in, after your brain truly gives you the green light to dig in and you really start hitting your stride, the euphoria of finally getting what you want starts to settle in. All is suddenly right with the world, your mind instead focused on this element with that sauce, or maybe that vegetable with this protein, the task of cleaning the plate the only one looming in your immediate horizon. When that world, your plate, is gone, so is your high. And that’s when you ask your dining companion, “What should we have next?”

This is something that happens, even if, as I was, you are somewhere patronized mainly by university students. Let me tell you, I typically avoid places that host a lot of university students as a rule. The reason is simple: they are young and their main motivation is value for money. They are young enough to think they have a lifetime of meals ahead of them, calories and grease and deep-fried breading be damned. So when Dwight (@bkkfatty) told me about a specific niche of restaurant that championed “steak” for student budgets, I was intrigued and made him take me to the Sam Yarn market, where Today Steak (or Steak Today, we can never be sure) resides on the second floor.

Thais have always been good at taking foreign influences and twisting them into something that is unique and probably unrecognizable to their creators. These budget steakhouses — and they are a specific niche, perhaps most famously represented by Chokchai Steakhouse — fall roughly into a similar category to the mid-century “luxury Western” restaurants like Silom Pattakarn and Agave that serve Chinese-Thai takes on Western dishes such as beef stew and Anglicized chicken curry. These steakhouses are, if not exactly parodies, then idealized versions of their American counterparts, serving food that is actually affordable and tailor-made to young Thai tastes.

My “pork godfather”, even though I asked twice for beef

At Today Steak, we took seats in an air-conditioned room dominated by what was clearly a Chulalongkorn University student meeting of some sort. A bridge actually connects the second floor of the market to the campus, making it basically another canteen of the university. I envied these students with their lives ahead of them, thinking that there were good things to come. Because you see, I had already seen the menu.

The basic philosophy of these types of restaurants are that there is nothing that a slab of processed cheese, bacon or red sauce cannot fix. There is no dish in which one of these elements is not present, unless you give up completely and order the Thai food (and then, why are you here?) The prices never veer over 200 baht, even if you order a T-bone steak (160 baht). But again, why chicken out and order the T-bone steak, if you are here? You came here to play, did you not?

And, even if you do try to order beef, there is a very good chance you will not get it. I twice tried to order the “beef godfather” for 150 baht (OK, I liked the name), only to receive a breaded pork cutlet garlanded with a salad tossed in mayonnaise and peas, cold white bread touched with margarine and the kind of ketchup-y Thai spaghetti that makes you realize why Pan Pan became such a culinary sensation in the 1980s.

Me, thrilled to be so close to a big bottle of mayonnaise

Dwight ordered the “filet mignon” (120 baht), which we assumed would be a beef ribeye. Smothered in a red sauce and slices of flabby bacon, it looked a lot more like well-seasoned pork. Does this explain the price tag? In any case, the fries were as good as Dwight promised they would be.

But authenticity is not the point. It’s never the point here, unless it’s Thai food. The point is that this food is the stuff of someone’s childhood. This is the Thai equivalent of that alarming “salad” of lime jello, pineapple and nuts that your grandma keeps busting out on Thanksgiving. Tuna casserole with lots of canned cream of mushroom soup and potato chips crumbled on top. Sweet potatoes crowned with cherry pie topping and mini-marshmallows. Let’s not pretend this is grosser than anything else we’ve seen.

At the end of the evening, though, we showed our age. We finished our meal at Nai Peng Kua Gai and finally considered ourselves fed. As I write this now, I am planning on chasing my next high with a big plate of pad se ew.

Lunch at Feel in Yangon

There is something wrong with being on a diet while on holiday. Not only is it perverse — you are supposed to be on holiday — but it could quite possibly be immoral. Yes, immoral, or maybe just narrow-minded, or, at the very least, criminally incurious. You are in a new country, not your home, shutting yourself off from sampling the very best that country has to offer. Yes, there are sights to be seen and money to be spent buying souvenirs for people who will throw these souvenirs away after you have left. But closing off the very best part of you, making it subject to rules that curtail the full enjoyment of a country’s cuisine — making that stomach, in effect, work while on holiday — that’s just wrong. That is no way to travel.

This is what I’m telling myself, anyway. That diets are immoral while on holiday in Yangon. Because it would be criminally unfair to Myanmar. And I want to give Myanmar’s cuisine every chance, as many chances as a good-looking white guy in the entertainment industry could possibly hope for. Taylor Kitsch- and Justin Bieber-level chances. That’s how generous I want to be to Myanmar. Because I suspect that food may be getting a bad rap.

Patrick, who lives in Yangon, had been telling me I should try out the food in Myanmar for a while, and I agreed that I should, in the way that one agrees they should go to the dentist, or finally get around to listening to that new Eminem album. Which is to mean, it would probably never happen. But one night (in Bangkok), Patrick told me something that was so simple that it blew my mind: Myanmar food is delicious to the Myanmar people. Just as Thai food is delicious to the Thais — something that Thai people don’t really consider, because they think whatever Thai people like must be liked everywhere else too. In Thailand: balanced flavors, different textures, good aroma=good. In the US: rich, creamy, salty, sweet. What is good in one country is not necessarily good in the other. What are the culinary values in Myanmar?

Denigrated as oily and salty by Thai people, Myanmar’s food operates along a wholly different set of values: heavy even when it’s light; highly flavored; filling. It’s food that asks to be remembered, well after the meal. All dishes — even the salads — adhere to this rule. The one time I went to Yangon in 2006, the only meal I honestly remember was Chinese-style hotpot. Who would I be if I didn’t want to try real Myanmar cuisine?

Streetside sweets in Yangon, reminiscent of Thai kanom tua pap

Perhaps the most famous purveyor of Burmese cooking is Feel, an unassuming cafe on a nondescript street in what I’m told is the expatty part of the city. Once inside, customers are expected to grab the first seat that comes available and then somehow navigate their way through a vast curry buffet amidst a crowd of equally-hungry Burmese customers. Happily, Patrick takes charge, ordering a delicious beef curry, a sweet-and-sour fish, a chili dip strongly resembling Northern Thai nam prik ong, and a tart, crunchy pennywort salad that still coats the tongue even after it’s gone (“Heavy even when it’s light,” Patrick says). There’s even a clear refreshing soup that tastes of pickled bitter gourd. Even after all that, Patrick eventually gives in and orders the tea leaf salad — arguably Myanmar’s most famous dish and a mishmash of textures and pungent, bottom-heavy flavors that never skew acid. “Real tea leaf salads are never sour,” Patrick says. Everything is delicious, even if it’s different from what Thais would say is good.

Feel’s tea leaf salad, with the necessary garnishes

Later, in Bagan, we get a different view of Myanmar food at an outdoor vendor set up in the shadow of one of the temple’s parking lots. When we ask one of the guards if he knew of a good place to eat lunch, we are totally unprepared for him to ask his friend to take over his post, and wait with us(!) while my notoriously snail-like daughter slowly makes her way through the temple. He takes us through the parking lot to the far side of the bric-a-brac vendors, and we entertain thoughts of him killing us only once. Finally, he leads us to a vendor set up behind a makeshift stove and set under a blue tarp, orders for us, and sits with us while we take our first bites. What they served: a clear, oily (but not unpleasantly so) spicy soup with pork; a salty-spicy salad of acacia leaves and minced meat; stir-fried snake gourd with eggs, and honking big fluffy omelets piled on top of rice bulked up with beans. This type of hospitality was not uncommon during our trip to Myanmar. It got to the point where we hesitated to ask for the bathroom, for fear someone would end up driving us to their home.

A streetside lunchtime feast

It was an important lesson about Myanmar, its people and its culture, and one that may not have been learned, had I been on a diet.

Starchy streetside snack at the market in Yangon

Tahitian Christmas tree at the local Carrefour

Manava Suite Resort may have dangerous electrical wiring and some truly alarming breakfast sausages, but one of the good things about it — besides its near-constant UB40 soundtrack — is its location. On the western side of Tahiti, considered preferable to the storm-battered east, Manava (or “welcome” in Tahitian) is a short 3-5-minute walk away from a smattering if open-air streetside eateries that open up after the sun goes down (6:30pm, give or take a few minutes).

The menu is what you might expect when the food comes out of a truck or a roadside grill: sometimes pizza, sometimes Chinese, even Thai. But the preponderance of the menus feature lovely grilled things, almost always plopped unceremoniously atop a crisp bed of perfect, McDonald’s-like fries. There’s chicken of course, because where would we be without chicken, and juicy, meaty fresh-off-the-grill steak. Sometimes pork ribs, and chewy, toothsome chunks of veal heart on a skewer, nudging a vast wedge of macaroni-and-cheese, because God is good in Tahiti. I love this food in its simplicity and its emphasis on pure comfort and hospitality.

Freshly grilled steak and beef heart skewer

Believe it or not, this was not my first time in Tahiti. I’ve been before. Reading back on what I thought of it then, I can barely recognize myself. It’s especially bewildering since this was the first trip I took with the first four books of George R.R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire”, discovering for the first time Cersei and Ned and Jon and Dany against a backdrop of impossibly blue sea and a shooting star-filled sky. The only reason I can come up with for all the past doom and gloom was that I might have been annoyed with a traveling companion or two. This time, armed with a far inferior set of books, I found I didn’t really need them. The food and company were great, although I can’t really speak for my nephew Remy:

The expression I get after someone complains about “Feast for Crows” and “Dance with Dragons”

There’s a whole bunch of roadside places once you turn right out of the resort, but the best one may be one of the closest: Temaiti West Side (+87-720-620), instantly recognizable for the hulking grill set up next to a brightly lit cart and the collection of almost-always-full tables behind it in an ill-lit parking lot. My son was truly afraid to sit down for dinner, but got over it after our meal arrived, which was chicken and fries and more fries, with I think a salad that I’ve forgotten all about because the chicken.

Straight off the grill onto the plate

And this time, I found I didn’t have a problem with the simplicity of poisson cru. OK, these islands were colonized by the French, but they didn’t take on their anal-retentive cooking techniques and persnickety dining habits. It’s damn hot! Ain’t nobody got time for that! (Except for Thai people, because we are nuts and obsessed with what other people think about us).

“Chinese-style” poisson cru at Restaurant Menere

“Traditional” poisson cru (do we see the difference here?) at Manava

Or maybe the South Pacific is an ideal destination for a different me, one who is too hot and ain’t got no time for extraneous stuff. If there is a New Year’s resolution to be found somewhere in there, teased out of the roadside Papeete underbrush after a filling meal of steak and fries and someone else’s pizza, that may be it.